Dinner With The Girls

There are six of us girls.  We all met because we are related in some way to the practice of family law:  4 lawyers, 1 CPA and 1 mortgage broker.  We all love working with divorcing families; we love helping them move forward in a productive way.  What we don't like is investing ourselves in our cases, caring about our clients, doing a good job for them and have them leave us without paying their bills in full.  It doesn't matter whether we've "won" or "lost" their case - a successful outcome is no indication of whether a client will pay the bill.  They don't complain about the bill - they just don't pay it.   So, what is it that makes clients think that they can take full advantage of our expertise and our time, and not compensate us as agreed?  The problem is that the nicer you are about giving them time to pay their bills, the worse it is, because if you're not urgent, you're not important.  It feels like a betrayal.  It hurts to know that we do our jobs, we do them well, we care about our clients and what happens to them, and the same people in whom we made that investment don't value what we do.